The has gone from being the world's largest lender to the world's largest debtor...and interestingly enough one of the US's largest creditors is the Chinese central bank.
We have gone from having the most enviable public school system in the industrialized world to having the flat-out worst.
We don't invest in infrastructure, we don't protect our borders from illegal intrusion, we don't care about pollution or graft. As long as we can have the appearance of wealth...not to be confused with legitimate wealth which is grown, not borrowed.
I agree, the US is over as the preeminent power, its just going to take time for people to realize it. Around 2030 when China and the US face off probably in the Middle East for the remaining easy oil, Americans will get a rare taste of what war is like from the losing side.
I am tired of seeing this rolled out naively again and again. I like smooth fonts, multimedia support, device management, hires icons, a little bit of eye candy etc etc.
I derive utility from them and my hardware can handle it. This is not bloat.
There is an acceptable rate of resource consumption for applications that users will put up with and succesful widely used apps are staying close to this rate.
Once again, FVWM, lynx, etc are all there and debugged for the whiners who bemoan complex software.
Ebay had one good thing going - US auctions, and they have saturated and milked it for it all its worth. The only place they can go now is new markets and/or increased fees. Their new initiatives are getting mixed results - people have been burned by their terrible service for so long that many are put off by dealing with Ebay or PayPal in a new capacity. Their idea of raising fees is going over like a lead zeppelin.
Analysts have become accustomed to Ebay blowing out quarterly numbers regularly, but after the last earning's report it is obvious that this trend is over. All it takes is one prominent free auction site to really bury Ebay. The same "network effects" gravity that made people think the only useful auction site was Ebay can just as easily accelerate the departure to a new service.
By the end of 2006 Ebay will be trading in the $40s.
Child molesters are not in prison because they are mentally ill per se (an unproven premise by the way). They are there because of what they have done.
Knowing the perpetrator is going to be drinking his bunkmate's urine every morning (or get shanked) to be followed by licking his ass clean after he poops (or get shanked) followed by a North-Philly ass whooping each day in the yard (tell the guard, get shanked) has got to make it all worthwhile.
I don't understand these posts. If you want a zero-bloat environment, it is trivial for you to build one with any linux distribution. First, if you really want to avoid bloat, try lynx running on the console...this will enable you to do what you have always fantasized about - having top display an ongoing idle meter over 98% in another shell.
Now assuming you like graphics and different size fonts, fvwm, twm, or fluxbox etc are debugged, stable and widely available. Install one of them and go about your business.
How many people have bought the entire Knuth series just to occupy the moral high ground on their bookshelf? For my money, Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest's "Introduction to Algorithms" is preferred for almost all related material you might want to investigate.
You could either use the stick or the carrot...the "carrot" approach would be to get a hugely pivotal piece of code pushing alternatives. As I said in another post, if the kernerl was to use an alternative to make, this alternative would almost certainly see widespread adoption elsewhere.
The "stick" approach would be to mandate inclusion in the LSB so that all distros carry the tool. The BSDs and other OSs would certainly follow suit.
I agree its a difficult legacy problem to solve but it is not intractable.
Oh I agree it would be difficult to create such a distro...you would basically have to have a method for yanking the existing toolchain out and in its place putting in the equivalent modern tool syntax.
As for sh this could be done...in fact many distros are using Pythin in many places where sh was once used.
In the end it will take one hugely succesful and unavoidable project to push alternatives. For example, if the kernel itself pushed an alernative to make, this alternative would almost certainly spread to other projects.
In any case its likely a non-issue as long term more people are using prepackaged software, and also using code that is outside the gnu tools realm, like Python and mono code.
sh (uselss for scripting, completely broken at anything but trivial command line work) and make (terrible, painful and not very featureful) are probably top of the list for me...I'm amazed these were not replaced long ago. The entire autotools chain should be discarded.
Would love to see a distro that replaces sh with python/perl...replaced make with scons etc.,....at least this distro could claim a differentiating point beyond the installer. I would use it.
How is your non-sequiter insightful?
on
The CSS Anthology
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· Score: 1
How do you make the inference that all online learning materials are "lame" or "time wasting"???
How do you make the inference that books are faster? Can you search a book with Ctrl+F? Care to take a bet that my Ctrl+F is faster than your index?
Right before Louis Gerstner started, the firm was in dire straits. There was talk of breaking it up and selling off the units. Gerstner held tough, but he also ended up laying off thousands and thousands of employees.
It wasn't until the mid 90s that IBM started to shine again...it literally took Gerstner a decade to turn it around.
Microsoft 2000-whatever
on
Microsoft in 2008
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Like any corporation that has survived and thrived due to a monopoly, it will never change and will take a very long time to die. See AT&T for a useful analogue.
Are you telling me the best they can do is a card with my password embossed right next to my name? As fas as I am concerned the CC number is a password since that and the expiration date are all that are needed to pilfer funds.
The CC industry needs to create a secure credit card. Until they do, fraud cannot be stopped.
I did not say you were required to use GCJ, just limit yourself to the subset of Java lang and libs that can be *compiled* by gcj. Last time I checked and recent Sun javac/java combo should be able to handle this....but when they do something you really don't like, you know you can fall back on a free option for compiling (note that *any* recent Sun JVM will still be able to run the code!)
We are being buried in data and are just beginning to adapt the crudest methods for organizing it and mining it. If in 20 years we have not solved the problem of dealing with giant piles of data, then IT will become a cost instead of a benefit.
I think a good baseline is to stick to that Java which can be compiled and run by the gcj* toolchain. This is for your own protection - in the event a vendor (gee guess who) ticks you off you will always have a free option.
While the gcj toolchain is not capable of supporting bleeding edge features, its likely you do not truly need these so the gcj baseline will also hold you to a sane subset of proven Java features.
VCs love the concept of social networking because it is potentially very cheap to set up and potentially offers huge lock-in (read: $$).
This idea that you can set up a server, pull people into a "network", make said network "indispensible", and then extract vast quantities of money for membership in this network sounds good, too good in fact. Its a great model for VCs but meaningless to most users. Besides dirty chat and file sharing, there is very little to bring people back to these sites again and again, and there are already better tools for achieving the aforementioned tasks.
Social networking, relevance networks, blogs...the only thing they apparently aren't throwing into this new vision is nanotech...well, give them time.
Really, how many users have to filter RSS blogs through social networks (peer review)??? As it stands no one has explained how to keep these social networks going past the "gee whiz" phase - see Friendster that has turned into a classic bitrot site. Furthermore what motivation is there for me to spend time assessing the viability of these feeds and performing the scoring?
Sorry, just another bunch of chancers trying to do the IPO-as-business model by way of zeitgeist overload thing redux.
Slashdot Mirror
We have gone from having the most enviable public school system in the industrialized world to having the flat-out worst.
We don't invest in infrastructure, we don't protect our borders from illegal intrusion, we don't care about pollution or graft. As long as we can have the appearance of wealth...not to be confused with legitimate wealth which is grown, not borrowed.
I agree, the US is over as the preeminent power, its just going to take time for people to realize it. Around 2030 when China and the US face off probably in the Middle East for the remaining easy oil, Americans will get a rare taste of what war is like from the losing side.
I derive utility from them and my hardware can handle it. This is not bloat.
Once again, FVWM, lynx, etc are all there and debugged for the whiners who bemoan complex software.
Analysts have become accustomed to Ebay blowing out quarterly numbers regularly, but after the last earning's report it is obvious that this trend is over. All it takes is one prominent free auction site to really bury Ebay. The same "network effects" gravity that made people think the only useful auction site was Ebay can just as easily accelerate the departure to a new service.
By the end of 2006 Ebay will be trading in the $40s.
Child molesters are not in prison because they are mentally ill per se (an unproven premise by the way). They are there because of what they have done.
Knowing the perpetrator is going to be drinking his bunkmate's urine every morning (or get shanked) to be followed by licking his ass clean after he poops (or get shanked) followed by a North-Philly ass whooping each day in the yard (tell the guard, get shanked) has got to make it all worthwhile.
Now assuming you like graphics and different size fonts, fvwm, twm, or fluxbox etc are debugged, stable and widely available. Install one of them and go about your business.
How many people have bought the entire Knuth series just to occupy the moral high ground on their bookshelf? For my money, Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest's "Introduction to Algorithms" is preferred for almost all related material you might want to investigate.
The search is fast, the results are good, and the layout is clean(er). Maybe they are beginning to get it. Competition works.
Isn't that just a cellphone that only dials one number (911) and charges $19 a call?
Hey, at least they are redirecting their hoarde of gold back at the people who generated it instead of the execs.
The rudimentary math shows he was granted 150k shares, which at today's prices would put him in a pretax gain of $300k.
this still makes me laugh. And I mean laughing at him, not with him.
The "stick" approach would be to mandate inclusion in the LSB so that all distros carry the tool. The BSDs and other OSs would certainly follow suit.
I agree its a difficult legacy problem to solve but it is not intractable.
As for sh this could be done...in fact many distros are using Pythin in many places where sh was once used.
In the end it will take one hugely succesful and unavoidable project to push alternatives. For example, if the kernel itself pushed an alernative to make, this alternative would almost certainly spread to other projects.
In any case its likely a non-issue as long term more people are using prepackaged software, and also using code that is outside the gnu tools realm, like Python and mono code.
Would love to see a distro that replaces sh with python/perl...replaced make with scons etc.,....at least this distro could claim a differentiating point beyond the installer. I would use it.
How do you make the inference that books are faster? Can you search a book with Ctrl+F? Care to take a bet that my Ctrl+F is faster than your index?
It wasn't until the mid 90s that IBM started to shine again...it literally took Gerstner a decade to turn it around.
Like any corporation that has survived and thrived due to a monopoly, it will never change and will take a very long time to die. See AT&T for a useful analogue.
The CC industry needs to create a secure credit card. Until they do, fraud cannot be stopped.
I did not say you were required to use GCJ, just limit yourself to the subset of Java lang and libs that can be *compiled* by gcj. Last time I checked and recent Sun javac/java combo should be able to handle this....but when they do something you really don't like, you know you can fall back on a free option for compiling (note that *any* recent Sun JVM will still be able to run the code!)
We are being buried in data and are just beginning to adapt the crudest methods for organizing it and mining it. If in 20 years we have not solved the problem of dealing with giant piles of data, then IT will become a cost instead of a benefit.
While the gcj toolchain is not capable of supporting bleeding edge features, its likely you do not truly need these so the gcj baseline will also hold you to a sane subset of proven Java features.
This idea that you can set up a server, pull people into a "network", make said network "indispensible", and then extract vast quantities of money for membership in this network sounds good, too good in fact. Its a great model for VCs but meaningless to most users. Besides dirty chat and file sharing, there is very little to bring people back to these sites again and again, and there are already better tools for achieving the aforementioned tasks.
Really, how many users have to filter RSS blogs through social networks (peer review)??? As it stands no one has explained how to keep these social networks going past the "gee whiz" phase - see Friendster that has turned into a classic bitrot site. Furthermore what motivation is there for me to spend time assessing the viability of these feeds and performing the scoring?
Sorry, just another bunch of chancers trying to do the IPO-as-business model by way of zeitgeist overload thing redux.